The Phantom of Devil's Island
by Filhound
Summary: A young journalist goes to the infamous penal colony at Devil's Island intending to find a story that will jump start his career. He ends up finding so much more than he bargained for. Threatened by both guards and prisoners alike mysterious prisoner he is exiled to another part of the island where he encounters a man universally feared.


This story, and my other new one " _Pity Comes Too Late_ ", is going to be co-dependent. I am using a Darwinian approach survival of the most popular. I had two ideas, which are completely different. When I write sometimes the story line changes as I do so. At present, there will be some romance in this story but it could change. The other story definitely will have romance. If one story has more likes, reviews, followers, it will be updated more often than the other. Too little support means that the story might not be finished at all. It could happen to both stories if no one reads them. Equal support means that both will be written albeit at a slower pace. In the meantime since I am still not finished with _The Prison of My Mind_ neither story will get a lot of updates since that story will be my concentration until it concludes. Well, on with the show.

Paris, France June 29, 1954

Devil's Island Penal Colony August 20, 1898

When you are as old as I now am, often times you find yourself looking back on the past and your actions in it. I am no exception to the rule. I often ask myself, could I have done something better with my life? Will history remember me? If so, will it do so kindly? Did I make a difference in the world, or leave it the same, or even worse, as the world that I entered? I cannot help but wonder, _did I_? For most of my life my passion had been using my name and influence to help the poor wretches that ended up imprisoned in Guiana at the Devil's Island complex. The conditions there had been so appalling that most of the inmates sent there by France never made it back home alive. I am an exception, but then again I was never a real inmate. Still, given the harsh climate, the attitude of some of the guards and inmates and my naiveté I probably would have died long ago. But I guess that I had a guardian Angel to look after me or perhaps it was fate that placed me in his care. I am not sure.

Many sent to the penal colony had no such luck. Some died from the fierce tropical climate: more yet died from the strange diseases that had found many victims to prey upon there. Yet nobody cared about the poor wretches that had become afflicted by those harsh diseases. Other causes were thought far more worthy than that of helping prisoners receive humane treatment. People would often ask me, "why spend your days worrying about thieves, murderers and traitors to the Republic, when you could devote the same energy to far more deserving causes?" Perhaps they were correct, but then again if I had not applied my energies to this cause then who was going to do so? Their families? Their friends? Hardly, some of them were there precisely because they had no one to rally to their cause. If they did they did not have the proper pedigree to help make their voices heard. Despite France's new Republican government the ideals of the revolution had not translated into equality for all; some citizens were more equal than others.

But I did, me along with a handful of others. I made it my life's work to care, because I knew, without a doubt, that not all of them, even some who France had labeled the worst of the worst were truly evil, at least not in their hearts. I had learned that lesson long ago that sometimes those who called themselves the most 'Christian' could end up doing evil, and those labeled as 'evil' were perhaps merely misunderstood. Sometimes these alleged evildoers even misunderstood their own hearts, since they were likely told that they were 'evil' for their entire lives. Yes, not everyone born is blessed with loving parents, and even if they were it does not necessarily guarantee a good start in life. We are all products of who we were born to, and where and also our life experiences. Thus no one's life is entirely the result of his or her own proclivities.

Yet most of my fellow Frenchmen did not see these matters in the same way that I did. The communists would say that if you eradicate poverty that there would be little need to steal or even murder; thus the ones that did so would be truly deserving of imprisonment as deviants. The Fascists would call these felons inferior mongrels undeserving of a place in the French Nation; let alone any sort of pity or compassion, concluding that it would be best to execute the lot of them instead. Most other people just went about their lives not even thinking about the small group of islands hugging the South American coastline, and the satellite colonies on the mainland. They were too far away and unimportant to merit that much thought.

To bring them to mind, I needed to appeal to their consciences. Was it fair to throw away a man's life for the mistakes that he might have made under extenuating circumstances? Isn't it possible that from of some of them that redemption could still be found, if only they were given the opportunity? If so was it right to deny them the chance to reform themselves; or was punishment all that the state was interested in? These men were our brothers, cousins, or in my case, more likely my servants. If you were in their position, would you want humanity to cast you aside without the hope of redemption? Or would you desire to be given a second chance, or even a third or a fourth. Didn't the Lord, that we Christian's pray to, offer redemption to even the meanest of men and women? Or do we only pay lip service to our own faith and teachings? Did Christ himself not say, " _Let he who hath committed no sin among you, cast the first stone?"_ Yet the lesson that he taught us sometimes remains unheard.

For much of my life, I was determined, with the help the effort of more progressive citizens, to see the prison closed and the inmates transferred back to France. I started my fight when I was still a young man in my twenties, and now I am an old man in my seventies. Finally, last year, after more than fifty years of effort from me, and from others as well, the French government finally did close the prison. My efforts, along with those of my cohorts, finally paid off. The prison was closed and the remaining prisoners were all repatriated back to France. Those who served their time were free to live here once again; the more hardened prisoners were transferred to prisons in France itself. It was a long struggle but a worthwhile one.

When it finally happened, and the last prisoner was sent home, I felt a sigh of relief and a sense of accomplishment. I felt as if a burden were lifted from my soul, a debt repaid. I was sorry that my mentor had not lived to see it done. I am sure that he would have been proud of me for finding the character to see the job through, although he used to berate me for my 'uselessness' as a man. He had taught me that what you were born to be did not necessarily define forever who you might become if you possessed the strength of will to overcome your weaknesses. I owed him so much for teaching me that and so many other lessons. I owed him my very life, yet in return he demanded almost nothing from me.

I had experienced Devil's Island. I arrived there as a boy when it was at its peak, and left as a man. From that time forward the experience never left me. Of course part of the island stayed with me forever. While there, I had become afflicted with malaria. I would spend the rest of my life fighting off recurrences of that malady, but in the end I cannot say that I would not suffer through it all again, despite the pain. To have not gone through the experience that I did would have left me a far lesser man than the man that I did become. I would not have summoned the courage to do many of the things that I have done; accomplish many of my tasks, such as aiding the late resistance movement against the Nazis. Thanks to my time there, I had developed a lifetime aversion to bullies and a respect for those who might be called my inferiors.

Yet, I did not spend very long on Devil's Island; but the short time that I did spend there, among the inmates, was a seminal experience that altered my life forever. Prior to my time there I had been young and idealistic, but my beliefs ran very thin. Even now, I am not sure if I held them because of my own true feelings or to declare my independence from my extremely conservative father. Either way I emerged from my experience a different man than the one who arrived in that wretched place. While there I had an unlikely mentor and protector, a man, who had been universally feared and despised even by the most cutthroat of the prisoners and most of the guards as well. A true cast off from humanity; yet I am not sure that it wasn't we who suffered more for turning our backs on him. He was a man apart from all of them, different both in look and in outlook than almost anyone else. But he would have stood out in any crowd. He was a giant among dwarfs, and if he had been exiled to the prison at Devil's Island, then it was not because he failed society rather it is because we, as a society, failed him. We scorned and rejected him repeatedly until he turned his back on us.

He is a man who might appear only once or twice in a generation, with an intellect every bit as vast as an Edison or an Einstein; but it was not celebrated as theirs were, rather he was mocked. Like a cockroach, or a rat, he was driven to dwell in the darkest places; forgotten places, where no one else dare to go. Those dark places had become his place of sanctuary, a place where he could exist relatively undisturbed. Ironically, so were those terrible islands, which he had come to call his home. He thrived in that environment like few before or after his residence there. In his imprisonment there he attained a sense of freedom that he had never found before, despite his earlier travels searching for just such a place. Yet this is not a story about the blessings of the prison, because no matter what, a prison is a place that is designed to keep one from gaining access to their hopes and to their dreams. It is a place that dreams either die or are transformed. In short, it is a place of nightmares.

Like the other souls imprisoned there, this man was deprived of what he most needed. He had only one dream and that was to find, and experience, the love of a woman at least once in his life. That was not a Herculean task for most men. But for him it was a goal beyond reach. You could not find love on Devil's Island. It did not exist there, not then, not ever and he had little chance of leaving because he was serving a life sentence there for murder. For that man love had been scarce even before reaching its shore; for from birth he was hideous to behold and thus not desirable to any woman that he had encountered. Yet it did not mean that he did not try. His ill-fated attempt to find love had ended in disaster for all concerned, and landed him in Devil's Island; sentenced to live out all of his remaining days there. France had turned its back upon him, and sentenced him to hell. The feeling was mutual; he had turned his back upon humanity a long time before his sentence was imposed.

I will never forget the first time that I saw the prison at Devil's Island. It was in the summer of 1898. The world was in the final years of the _Belle Epoch;_ a time of mixed blessings and curses for France. We had witnessed the introduction of amazing inventions such as the automobile, the telephone and moving pictures. It was a truly admirable era in the arts with new movements in dance, music and painting. We had made some spectacular social progress. In this era success was not necessary an accident of birth, any man could rise and take his place among the most elevated of men, provided that they had enough money to do so. One could even buy their way into the nobility if they so desired. Of course here in France new nobility could no longer be created since the fall of the Empire in 1871. Although no new titles could be created you could still marry into the right sort of family and gain access to its title that way. That path was unnecessary for me as I was the scion of a very old French noble family. My blood was as blue as the bluest sky or deepest ocean. I even held the title of Vicomte.

At that time France was still reeling. Not long before we had lost a humiliating war to Prussia, followed by the fall of the Empire, the rise of the Communards and their brutal suppression, followed by the onset of waves of various new political movements from the far left and the far right fringes of society such as anarchists, Marxists and Boulangerists. A new century was around the corner, a century full of even more changes and nobody knew what to expect in the new century. At the time I was a young reporter for a small liberal newspaper by the name of _La Voix de la Verite,_ 'The Voice of the Truth' in the English language. It was a naïve left-leaning periodical that folded years ago during the First World War when they published stories of military scandals, which were found to adversely affect the war effort. All true of course but in wartime truth and national interest can often times be adverse to one another. The publisher of the paper had never come to learn that lesson and so was punished for it by being abruptly shut down. But that was years after I had stopped working there and I had already learned that lesson. Indeed I only worked there for a very short time because I had outgrown my time there rather quickly. As my friend from the island would repeatedly remind me, 'truth is unique to the individual's own viewpoint. To an ant, a mound in the grass might be a mountain, blades of grass a jungle: yet to a human it is simply another place to tread upon.' How right he was, as usual.

When I became employed there, I had only recently graduated from the Sorbonne, with not particularly impressive grades. I had gone there merely to assuage my boredom. I was not expected to work upon graduation, as my family was wealthy. I was more of a student of life having had spent some time in Brazil, Turkey and in India as well. In my youthful arrogance I was sure that I knew more about the world than most young men of my age. Yet back then, as I soon would discover, I knew nothing about the world. I had viewed those various places from the comforts of wealth and its protective cocoon, never from the prospective of how the poorer men lived. Thus, my truth was different from most men's. My father had served as a high-ranking French diplomat in all of those places, so I thought that I knew what heat and jungle-like conditions were. But, compared to where I was headed, they were all paradise. I was an indolent fool, as my mentor had been so fond of reminding me back then.

Little did I know that I was headed to Hell on Earth. Ignorant of what awaited me, I had volunteered to write an expose about the conditions of the prison there. I had heard so many horror stories about it that I wanted to learn the truth and I believed myself to be strong enough to find it. Even back then some people were calling for the prison to be closed. It was said to be worse than the old Bastille prison where the enemies of the _Ancien Regime_ had been sent to suffer in wretched conditions. I have both Bourbon and Valois blood coursing through my veins so I am sure that some my ancestors had consigned some of their enemies to their ends in the Bastille. It was somewhat ironic that I, with that illustrious background, should be called to go there to investigate the alleged cruelties of another prison but it was my choice. As I said, the assignment was my own idea. Instead of simply going there as a proclaimed reporter, it was my idea to change my identity to that of a petty theft and arsonist who was sentenced to a seven year sentence there. I felt that I could find a better story if I came disguised as a prisoner. I could not exactly go in as myself, the wealthy Vicomte de Rennes, and find the out the truth, whatever it might be. To ascertain what the true conditions of the penal colony were, I had to live them. It opened up doors that would have been slammed shut had I tried to enter them without my disguise. The truth would have remained hidden from me, like a beautiful mask hiding a horrible face. I would have seen only what I was meant to see and nothing more.

My father had once thought that I might make a fine military officer, as the youngest son of a noble house. But I was not one to follow the path of what was expected of me. I had had some professors who had introduced me to the writings of several influential movements such as the anarchists and the communists. At the University, much to my father's dismay, I had flirted with all of them. If it were up to him I would have been a monarchist, but I could not see where a system that promoted men based on family, and not ability could be the one of most efficiency. My father was reactionary, Anti-German and Anti-Semitic, as most upper class Frenchmen were in that day. I was not. At that moment, I was very incensed at a certain occurrence, which had served to divide upper class French society into two halves. Naturally my father and I were diametrically opposed, as usual, and his view goaded me into even more defiance of his view. I had read Emile Zola's indictment of the French establishment for how ' _L'Affaire Dreyfus'_ had been handled, and agreed. It was clear that the Jewish officer had not been afforded a fair trial, but that his religion had been on trial as well and summarily convicted. He had been stripped of his rank and position and sent to the Penal Colony to live out the rest of his days. I did not understand why a man's religion should determine whether he was guilty and thought that he deserved a new and fair trial. In the meantime he had been shipped to the Penal Colony at Devil's Island to live out his days.

I had heard about the appalling conditions in the Penal Colony, and felt my anger stir against a system that would send innocent men there to work until they died, and they were then forced to remain in Guiana as colonists for many years after the expiration of their sentences; if they could survive to begin with. It offended my honor as a Frenchman that my supposedly democratic country would do such a thing to a man, even if he were either innocent or only guilty of a lessor offense that did not deserve such an exile. I must confess that I felt that I could find a story that might propel me to the heights of my profession, as well. Given my background, I felt that I needed to prove my worth. I was the youngest child by a decade, an accident that had proven to be both a blessing and a curse. I was spoiled rotten as a child, and was given the best of everything. I was truly an innocent and ignorant young cur despite my education. I was not prepared for the journey that I was about to embark upon, not one bit.

Don't ask me why I pushed for the assignment to begin with. When I submitted it to my editor as an idea seeking his approval, even he thought that I was crazy. He did not think that I, a man of obvious culture and refinement, could survive such an assignment and in hindsight he was most likely correct. It was a miracle that I did survive. In the editor's eyes, at the age of twenty-one, I was barely a man, let alone a reporter of substance. The paper had had only hired me to spite my father, who owned a very conservative rival newspaper. My father had had me blackballed from all of the more prestigious publications stating that it was beneath our family's position for me to indulge in such pedestrian pursuits as to write for a living. I was not expected to work for money but that was what I wanted to do.

That being said my new employer hardly took me seriously. I was assigned to follow music, arts and society. It was another reason that they hired me, for my access to those events and people. I moved in the highest circles, where I had been known to be quite the playboy and the rumors were not wrong. I had been named in the society column more than once, infamous for a couple of my 'Affaires de la Coeur' with some of the women, particularly of the Opera Populaire but also in Montmartre. The editor, Monsieur Strassburger, despised the notion that those subjects needed to be covered, but crusading for the 'Truth' did not sell that many newspapers; discussing the newest activities of 'Comtesse de so and so, did. Monsieur Albert Strassburger was everything that my father despised, a Marxist Alsatian Jew with a pince-nez placed precariously on his long nose. My father had explicitly forbidden me from working there, and especially for 'that Jewish parasite' as he called Monsieur Strassburger, which naturally made it so much more attractive of a workplace for me. He would have been better off begging me to work there, and then I might not have done so.

Once hired, I was sent to cover all of the most mundane events: the opening of Expositions, Theatre Productions, Operas and various galas. While doing so I continued indulging my so-called 'extra curricular activities and then some. Like a young lion I would prowl various venues searching for my next heart to break. My assignments only enhanced my ability to do so. Aspiring actresses would throw themselves at my feet, hoping for a good review. I enjoyed myself immensely earning the wrath of various artistic authorities. The ballet director of the Opera Populaire, Antoinette Giry, in particular despised me, for compromising the reputation of several of her girls. I was guilty of some of it, but not all. I had a handsome face and woman flocked to me. Some of the bolder ones even propositioned me. I had been raised in Embassies and Legations so I knew how to pour on the charm when I had to. You could say that, like my father before me, I was a natural born diplomat.

But despite what the world thought of me, in my heart I did not want to be defined as another rich and titled fop. I wanted to make my mark upon the world. Despite enjoying myself, I chaffed at the chains that my position imposed upon me. I longed to prove myself to be a serious journalist; thus I proposed to go to Devil's Island to find a story. If I had not been so young I might have questioned my own sanity for doing what I did. When one is young, they don't think about fragility of life. I was healthy and strong and I believed that I could handle myself with acuity among the thieves and murders of the Penal Colony. I was a fair marksman and handled a sword fluidly. I had spent many a free day fencing and practicing the other 'manly' arts of war but of course my opponents all followed certain rules.

When I arrived at the Penal Colony, I was supposed to stay there for only two weeks, until the next ship was due to arrive. After which the truth would be disclosed and I would return to France to write my story. The boat from Cayenne landed at Ile Royale; the main reception center for the ships disgorging its cargo of what France deemed the worst of its human trash. Like the prison, the ship was full of thieves and murders and a few political prisoners as well. Those unfortunates were men who had offended the government by plotting for the return of the fallen monarchy, were communists or anarchists and spies and traitors of all sorts. In recent years both the 'ancien regime' and the Empire had given away to the Third Republic and the supporters of both monarchies found their way there, as well as Communards and other 'so- called' patriots most recently the Boulangists who had recently attempted to overthrow the republican government.

One could tell who was who, many of the political prisoners looked young and idealistic, at least at first. They looked down upon the common thieves and murderers who populated the prison colony. Yet they, compared to the more common prisoners, would not last very long in the hot tropical environment. Even so, the criminals fared little better; eighty percent of them would never see France again. They would be likely to die from the terrible conditions in the notorious penal colony, but the people in metropolitan France barely took notice. Few of the prisoners had anyone back there who cared about their fate. They were the garbage of France and had faced either imprisonment in the penal colony or death on the guillotine. Many would have chosen death because to be confined to Devil's Island was a form of living death. Hope did not exist on the island, only sickness, and eventual death. Only the most hardened souls survived and a few grew to dominate the island society.

The prison was so remote and it was almost impossible to escape it due to the treacherous and water currents that surrounded the Islands that hosted the inmates. Even if one could escape, the mainland was just as terrible hundreds of miles of mosquito infested, harsh terrain separated the French part of Guiana from the sanctuaries of Venezuela and Brazil, Dutch and British Guiana were just as uninhabitable for even the most adaptable of Frenchman. The mosquitos did not discriminate between the strong or the weak yet had the power to kill either of them. The only way off was when your sentence was done, and even then most prisoners had to serve an equal sentence as a Colonist on the mainland. It was the only way that the French could establish human settlements in this hostile land. Thus a ten-year sentence became twenty, and twenty forty. In the meantime a young man would age considerably into an old man. I was no exception to the rule. I went to the island a boy of one and twenty and emerged a man, aged years in outlook. Never again would the young playboy return, he died there on the island.


End file.
